Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Just got back from the Squatch. Most of the caravan had tickets for Sat+Sun, so it was decided to camp out in the desert near George. And since there were so many people going, some of us had to go early and save camping spots. So, we headed out on Thursday.

I haven't gone camping for over a decade. It was a lot of fun. Wait, did I say fun? It was a lot of rain. A whole lot. It pretty much rained constantly except for Saturday, when it got crazy hot.

I was there to see DantheAutomator. He was playing with Crudo, whom I'd never heard of, but they weren't bad. And that introduced me to Butterscotch, who is ridiculously talented.

Modest Mouse played later and REM followed, but the rain had returned. In fact, we got rained out of most of REM's performance, and I love REM.

The following day, most people had had so much fun that they sold their Sunday tickets and came back early. ^_^ They didn't need any more fun. They had reached a saturation point for fun (and/or rain). Good times!

Unfortunately, I forgot to bring my camera (although I did remember to charge the batteries for it. My old-timers is selective), so no pics yet. Hopefully I'll pick some up from the other adventurers.

(also, it was a tad more expensive than I anticipated. I had my credit card declined today for the first time. But that's OK, since I was just buying food, and how much of that stuff do you really need anyway?)

So, my computer crashed and I lost my work around 3am. I started over (hey, it was all fresh in my mind, right?) and worked for about another three hours when I realized I was so tired I couldn't type properly anymore. So I thought I would pop home, take a short power-nap, get up re-energized and polish my paper. Right?

Well, I got a little too optimistic, and set my alarm so early* that I slept through it, and then slept through class.

Monday, May 19, 2008

Eastern Washington University is pleased to announce that Dr. Kosuke Imamura has been selected as the 2008 Fosseen-Kusaka Distinguished Professorship Fellow by Mukogawa Women's University in Nishinomiya, Japan.

Imamura, who is an assistant professor in Eastern's College of Science, Health and Engineering, was selected from a pool of several faculty applicants at the conclusion of the fall 2007 open nomination process.

Imamura will travel to Japan in early June where he will be hosted by the Mukogawa Women's University (MWU) Informatics Department. During his one-week stay, he will be introduced to Japanese culture, deliver lectures in his academic field to MWU students and interact with his Japanese faculty colleagues.

Eastern is proud to offer this unique opportunity in association with Mukogawa Fort Wright Institute (MFWI), a branch campus of Mukogawa Women's University, as part of the ongoing partnership between Eastern Washington University and its Japanese counterparts. Eastern has worked with MFWI to foster international exchange and strengthen professional ties between our institutions since 1994.

To emphasize, in case you missed it, they are going to fly Kosuke Imamura (a Japanese gentleman) to Japan where he will (among other things) be introduced to Japanese culture. I'm sure he is looking forward to this exciting once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn about a distant land.

Sunday, May 18, 2008

So, there are these auto-run hacked levels of Super Mario World, which if you haven't seen yet, GIYF. (Check the via link if you can't find any)

But never have I seen a level like this. This is an 11-minute monster, which in addition to being completely automatic, incorporates sound effects from the actions of the game synchronized with the music. You really have to see (and hear) it to believe it.

Out there in the Milky Way galaxy there's a lot of stars. Occasionally one goes nova, rarely supernova, as they explode. There is a sphere of very active radiation leaving such stars. If one went off in our vicinity, up to twenty light years away, say, all higher forms on Earth would be sterilised, at least.

More worrying still are gamma-ray bursters. Gamma-rays are very short wavelength electromagnetic radiation, such as x-rays. When astronomers managed to develop instruments that could detect such radiation , and put them in satellites, they discovered that two or three times per day the Earth is illuminated by an intense burst of gamma-rays coming from somewhere out in space.

So far, all the gamma-ray bursters we've seen are a long, long distance away. But one could light up anywhere. If a pair of neutron stars collapsed on to each other within a hundred light years of Earth, life might survive in the deep seas and the deepest rocks, but the rest of our planet would be dead.

And we wouldn't even see it coming.

Asteroids and comets give you a bit of notice. We have the capability, given a year's run-up time, to tackle small Earth-crossing asteroids now. We can see them coming and plot their arrival. But gamma-rays are electromagnetic: they travel at the speed of light. They could be on their way now: we couldn't know. As soon as we did know, we and our technology would be dead.

Terry Pratchett, The Science Of Discworld, p258-9, abridged.

Although the title is "The Science Of Discworld", it's really the science of our world. And it's fascinating. ^_^

Thursday, May 01, 2008

It is curious that the strongest believers in the soul tend to be people who denigrate material things; yet they then turn their own philosophy on its head by insisting that when an evident process -- life -- comes to an end, there has to be a thing that continues. No. When a process stops, it's no longer 'there'. When you stop beating an egg, there isn't some pseudo-material essence-of-eggbeater that passes on to something else. You just aren't turning the handle any more.